Meanwhile, a second helicopter piloted by Dan Rudert, Salt Lake City, waited to intercept the unseen target. Guided by radar staffed 100 miles away at Hill Air Force Base, it hovered below the cloud deck.

As news media folks shivered in an icy wind, the parafoil showed up beneath the clouds. Rudert's chopper moved toward it — two black dots against the white cloud cover. The helicopter flew near the capsule, the parafoil's wings visible. The release helicopter appeared below the clouds, too.

As the parafoil drifted toward the viewing area, Rudert moved around it, then swung close over the target, looking from a distance almost as if it were on top of the parafoil.

About 2,400 feet above ground, a hook on the end of an 18-foot pole affixed to the bottom of the helicopter snagged the parafoil, and the wings briefly collapsed, looking like jellyfish hanging in the air. A drag device carefully allowed a line to play out from Rudert's 'copter. It was like fishing line on a rod, with the reel's drag slowing the fish but not letting the line break.

The target was snagged, and all that remained was the more or less routine task of lowering it to waiting scientists.

"It went very well," said Don Sevilla, payload recovery lead engineer, who headed the team that built the payload capsule.

Sevilla, with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of Pasadena, Calif., explained the canister below the parafoil wasn't just dead weight. It carried instruments to show how the re-entry went.

"I had a shock monitor for detecting what kind of ride it was getting during capture," he said. "There's also load sensors in the lines that are supporting the parafoil."

The canister also carries communications equipment and a global positioning satellite locator, he added.

"It was outstanding," said Bob Corwin of Lockheed Martin Astronautics, which built the capsule. "And a day like this gives us a chance to prove we can work with cloud covers and this kind of stuff."

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E-mail: bau@desnews.com